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Game Streaming's Latency Problems Will Be Over in a Few Years, CEO Says (arstechnica.com)
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia conference last week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says the rise of streaming gaming was an inevitability that was just waiting on the technology to power it at scale. While Zelnick acknowledged that the streaming game servers "have to be pretty close to where the consumer is" to address latency issues, he said there are a few large-scale companies "that have hyperscale data centers all around the world," and that infrastructure will be able to address that last remaining hurdle in a few years time. A report adds: Zelnick's comments come a few months after Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested that streaming games will completely replace consoles after one more generation. Guillemot suggested that changeover would cause a revolution in the gaming market, which will explode in size and accessibility thanks to cheap, streaming-capable boxes delivering big-budget hits. Zelnick agreed that streaming will increase the size of the high-end, big-budget gaming market -- because "you don't need to buy a box in order to play our games" -- but stopped short of expecting a massive revolution. Even if streaming boxes end up much cheaper than current consoles and PCs for the same experience, there may not be that many additional potential players who don't currently have high-end gaming hardware. "I can't sit here and argue it will be a sea change in the business," Zelnick said of future streaming game services.
There's no financial incentive for ISPs to ever provide better service.
Even if there's a technical solution to the problem, given the general lack of competition in the broadband internet market, what makes the author think that technology will be available to most consumers within a few years?
e.g. In my area Verizon won't upgrade beyond 2Mpbs DSL. What makes you think they care about latency?
Can't wait to pay comcast for an ubisoft fast lane just so I can play the next formulaic installment of Assasin's Creed.
Im not sure why they havnt all shutdown, whose paying for these services and how is their experience?
High end gaming hardware? Consoles? Bullshit.
Double bullshit on 'next generation' gaming hardware being 'high end'. Phones will be powerful enough for everything but VR/AR. More or less, already are.
They are expecting to make money renting you mid priced CPU/GPUs, you will already have 'good enough' in your pocket.
If they think the PC gamers are going to use this, they ARE crazy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
By the time they can reliably stream HD game video at low latency, everyone will be wanting 8K-per-eye VR.
Usually it's gaming or pr0n that drives innovation. But in this case, where latency is the problem for streaming, it's Wall Street that is driving the tech and the improvements.
HFT. Latency = $. It gets addressed. of course, for HFT, it's all distance, but all the other clever tricks will be deployed to stream games. And the end ISPs will be in the hot seat if they monetize specialized performance. Maybe.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick
...
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested that
In this thread, a bunch of rich boys try to convince a bunch of other rich boys to give them money for reasons.
captcha: jacking
well want to play games then buy Comcast game line to get the best pings (free with cable tv plus or higher)
Unless they manage to repeal special relativity.
So the question is will people that are willing to spend money to have a good to great gaming experience decide that trash for free is OK with them ?
The only problem with game streaming is latency due to the distances involved and the double rendering (once at the datacenter, once at home).
Even if you're talking about simply stringing a wire from your house directly to the output of a video card in a regional datacenter, you have ~1 mS of delay. Every transistor that has to switch in between there, does so with a maximum frequency.
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“Ng’s van is air-conditioned. Not with one of those shitty ozone-safe air conditioners, but with the real thing, a heavy metal, high-capacity, bone-chilling Frigidaire blizzard blaster. It must use an incredible amount of Freon.”
—Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
"Our new technology moves data at a million times the speed of light, so latency is a thing of the past." said Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.
"Now where's my investment money?"
is it that they call "slashvertisement"?
pretty much kill this? My ISP just started metering the connections around here. I'm not going to be streaming a 1080p game when it costs me $20/gigabyte to go over my cap. And no parent in their right mind would. They do sell unlimited, but that's pushing $160/mo here. And all that's before we start talking about large swaths of the world that don't have fast enough broadband to do this.
Oh well, I guess I'll stick to indie games on Gog.
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And when these servers shut down in a few years because the masses have moved on to the next fad you won't be able to play. Sorry, do not want.
I've actually been playing Minecraft (Java) with my gaming buddies on our private server this past year and it is nice not to have to put up with the bullshit of loot boxes, DLC, or micro transactions. I can make texture packs, data packs, etc. without some company holding our entertainment hostage.
Regardless of how good an internet connection they can guarantee it will NEVER beat 0ms input lag from the box sitting right in front of me.
-- /r/Minecraft Redditard censorship:
It is against the rules to ask about the history of famous Minecraft servers such as 2B2T !
Here's my problem with the "Streaming is inevitable" people.
First, as in this Take-Two CEO's statements, he wants streaming to take over. His company and all sorts of fond corporate plans depend on it! So he's a biased observer.
Second, this is predicting the future. If there's one thing we ought to know, it is that predicting the future is not exactly scientific or reliable. On a first principles basis we ought to be skeptical that one successful business model will "inevitably" replace another successful business model. Is this a law of nature? I think not.
Third, computing power gets cheaper and more widely available every year. Connected with this is the concept that the speed of light puts global constraints on how quickly a network, any network, can respond to interactive requests. So yeah latency is a problem, but we already have the solution in hand: Cheap, powerful local computing! Why exactly would we walk away from silicon everywhere when it is so useful, and we know it works, and it's a surefire cure for the latency issue?
This whole argument is predicated on:
1). ISP's are going to invest billions to upgrade their networks (well, sorta, maybe. In North America they have been remarkably slow and reluctant to do so);
2). Gaming studios, or at least network caching companies, are going to invest billions to place servers close to their customers (they could, some of this infrastructure already exists);
3). My game streaming company needs this to happen and so between our ability to invest and "The Universe", it will happen.
Content distribution and multi-player, these are things that greatly benefit from a network, so that's not going away. However note that this does not automatically mean "game streaming". Remote rendering of screens just seems like a bad architecture and no corporate wet dream can make it less bad.
Just dumb the gameplay down. Then people using the wrong hardware can feel like badasses. That's what Halo did with aim assist, yes? To be fair, that's exactly how many PC fps's worked before mouse aiming was a thing. I recall it was a toggle as late as Shadow Warrior. As the desire to never "sell" another title grows, this mentality will creep across all aspects of gaming that require timing or reflex. They don't want to test your skill, they want to make you FEEL skilled.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to Realm Grinder.
Not going to sign up for remote gaming services with shit latency and a false promise of said issues being eliminated "in a few years".
If you can just sell me the fucking game to install on my own PC whenever the fuck that I want? Screw you. I'll do without.
I'm completely adverse to being fucked in the ass without even the courtesy of a reach-around.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm willing to talk shit about Comcast as much as the next subscriber, but while they've continued to jack my bill up over the past decade, they've continued to improve throughput as well.
What the christ is this word salad
Anyone else here play agar.io? If you can win that game with the latency you have you can win pretty much anything.
I 'member a time when Valve and bunch of other companies where developing a new protocol for gaming on modems and ISDN to basically make lower latency and faster speeds.
Oh damn, found it! PowerPlay! Right there in Valve's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
60% of the US geography has very poor internet or dialup.
This has been constant for 7 years, and only changed slightly in the last 15 years.
If the building with the game server is next door to a home, and that home has slow internet, then the game/video will still be slow.
This is game companies and other members of the oligarchy talking out their ass so they can pretend they do something for We The People.
Put up barriers to owning a home: rent instead (and put up with someone else's rules, and never build equity)
..and the list goes on and on
Make it prohibitively expensive to own a car: lease instead (and still pay for maintenance)
Fool people into believing 'streaming' all forms of entertainment is somehow cheaper than buying your own copies of music and movies
'OS and applications as a service' instead of actually owning copies of them (and pay, pay, pay forever)
It's the new feudalism; before too long you'll be told you're lucky to be allowed to own the clothes on your back.
Just stop obeying the laws of physics, then latency will be perfect. Right? Wrong. Just like monitors and big TVs with latency, good enough isn't good enough when it comes to competitive gaming.
This is fantasy bullshit.
How does paying a couple hundred for a TV and current internet access rates on top of $5-12/mo subscription PER GAME somehow unlock a market that today would be broken by the investment into a $300-400 console. If they were $5000, I could follow but not when a XboxOneS is already sub $300. If anything phones have gone the opposite way. Most of us have 3d-accelerated gaming consoles in our pockets right now. We may pay a few bucks a month for a game or two depending on the titles, but it certainly didn't fundamentally enable the types of complex, high-budget blockbusters that high-end gamers crave. It maybe, if anything, sent the market in the other way.
Top grossing appstore games are all less than $10. Most are free to play.
You're right but you could rent your own private remote gaming server. You'll then have some annoying input lag but also low or zero lag between your game client and the minecraft server.
In a contrived case this set up will beat a game running locally but played with bluetooth keyboard/mouse and an LCD display with input lag of its own.
What I can certainly agree with is the issue of not being able to run your own game server as in quake server, counterstrike server. [terminology is a problem there, earlier I said 'remote gaming server' to signify a remote gaming client [or in other terms a server that is a client and serves clients]].
There may be more freedom if you run your game not locally but can freely run servers, than if you run a game locally but the servers are a locked down hydra which you have no control over and may go permanently dead any time.
Take that Universe
maybe in the rest of the world, but there are still Americans who don't have access to broadband despite billions of dollars having been provided for deployments
My ISP just dropped the price by $10/month (to $22) and raised the speed to 400MBits up/down.
No sig today...
Dear confused - dial up still exists in many parts of the world and USA. There are places without **any** cellular service too, BTW. I visit family in places like that. I can assure you, it is really true.
Or are you limited to 140 characters and need to dumb down your statements for joe-six-pak willing to pay $200/month for ESPN, NFL, NHL, MLB, FINA and gaming "comcast premium" service?
So, we have the horror stories of US residential Internet like $160/month for 3Mbps down with gigabyte caps. But in some cases we have the big residential condos, soviet-style long buildings, social housing with subsidized rent. These are cheaper to retrofit for fiber Internet, or if built new they get fiber Internet in the first place - I think it's virtually guaranteed in places they've just banned new phone landlines.
Where I live this happens, even ghettos for sandnjggers. So it's possible to be on min wage and have gigabit Internet.
There is much variation. You can live well off in a suburban house and stuck on DSL, live in center of town in a small building rich or poor and stuck on DSL, live in a large building rich or poor and get fiber, live in a million dollar house and either be stuck on old DSL or get fiber..
I like to think all the work we've done in fixing bufferbloat all over the edge will make interactive gaming more popular and pleasant. It would be nice if some gaming CEO acknowledged the benefits of sqm and rfc8290! Less bufferbloat will also make streaming games more feasible - IMHO, the biggest reason onlive failed was due to the widely variable latencies they encountered while trying to shove that much data down the pipe. I agree strongly however with those that think good interactive gaming requires very low ms latencies, but there's room for something between farmville and call of duty here.
Amazing that they've kept finding an FTL communication method this quiet.
Care to share some details? If for no other reason than for the rest of us who are getting screwed to be able to take this example to publicly shame our own ISP's who keep fucking us?
Please, please, please....
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
These guys just ooze contempt for the very concept of ownership.
Read it just fine. Might be you sparky.
They said CoC, heh heh heh.
They say cheaper streaming boxes will explode the number of customers. But if the reason those people don't play is that they can't afford the hardware how are they gonna be able to afford the games then? Especially since the cost of a console is 5x to 8x the price of an AAA game.
Maybe they will lower the prices expecting to make it up with the increased number of players but I doubt that.
If we were able to come to agreement on the reach-around, you'd be good with it then?
I would imagine Joce640k does not live in the US. Some of us enjoy the benefits of a competitive ISP market.
As Moore's Law slows to a standstill, it will saturate the market over time with "end-game" top of the line hardware because that's all that will getting made at the fabs. If they manage to get down to the 3nm node, everyone will have 32-core/64-thread CPUs, 128GB of HBM4 RAM and 80 TFLOP single precision GPUs at home and in their pockets by 2025.
This is Take Two, who make hundreds of millions a year with GTA Online. If you want games without microtransaction bullshit, you're not the kind of customer they're looking for.
Care to share some details? If for no other reason than for the rest of us who are getting screwed to be able to take this example to publicly shame our own ISP's who keep fucking us?
Please, please, please....
Simple: I live in Europe.
No sig today...
Latency will never be a fixable thing for game streaming beyond a home server or university. "Fiber" (the lowest latency of _ALL_ mediums by a large amount) is subjected to the "peak" traffic blues for regular Joe Citizen. Oversubscribing/provisioning (Time Division Multiplexing) as a profit tool will NEVER EVER NOT ON YOUR LIFE go away. It's too profitable for RSP/ISP's to even consider streamers as they simply do not resonate big enough waves in the cesspool to care about. Low latency services for "professionals" are enterprise grade features that cost buku bucks that most, if not all, streamers just simply could not afford. Having said that, what are UNI dorms like for latency? I suspect there are a few circumstances low latency does exist.
C'mon folks, does your memory run back further than last week?
OnLive had credible, playable, streaming games... 8 years ago.
Latency was not an issue, because of the way we allocated the servers, and peered the networks.
Been there, done that, outstandingly...
It still runs on hardware. It runs on the same exact hardware you always need it to run on. And many of the "benefits" of it not always needing to be run by the same person can easily be snapped up by needing to run a ton of damned networking hardware.
Every games exec that brings up streaming seems to think hardware will come from the magical hardware fairy who gifts it to the wonderous cloud for free!
Considering I still have lag spikes just playing games that are on my disk, I have to say this will not happen for decades.
This is great! I've had way too much control for years at this point!
Finally there will be a group that the console peasants can look down upon.
PC Master Race
Console Peasants
???
Also, I laugh at the though of latency getting better. Higher bandwidth connections typically have *higher* latency because interleaving is used or extended for better noise rejection. And on top of this they are going to add compression and decompression latency? Hah! And wait for the ISPs to get involved "managing" their network.